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The Story Seller

FOR TWO LONG September days, I cruised the Los Angeles freeways with the “home stager” Meridith Baer and her two top deputies, looking at very expensive houses. Given the location, the dollar figures being tossed around and the fact that there were four of us in a gas-guzzling tank, I couldn’t help feeling like one of Vince Chase’s boys in “Entourage,” the HBO show that revolves around four buds driving in an S.U.V. from one breathtaking L.A. setting to another. But instead of looking at women, we were looking at houses.

Most were either on the beach or in exclusive enclaves like Brentwood and Beverly Hills and were on the market for more than $10 million. Although new and uninhabited, they were all furnished with Baer’s signature mix of antiques and custom-made furniture, her light palette and eccentric touches (she puts a cast-stone pig in every kitchen). They truly were the real estate versions of Vince Chase’s women — hot in a rather cold, untouchable way — and I only saw one that I actually wanted to marry, as it were.

I wanted it so badly that I now look at the photographs on the Realtor’s Web site and wonder how I can find millions of dollars and a reason to move West. It’s a penthouse condominium in the rehabbed National Biscuit Company building in scruffy downtown Los Angeles. The condo rises over three levels, with landings on the stairs between each one; it has exposed brick, walls of a pristine, tooth-whitened white, an interior elevator in case you’re too tipsy for the vertiginous stairs and more than 3,600 square feet of terrace space. From the rooftop deck, you can turn around slowly and catch views of the mountains, the famous Hollywood sign, LAX, the Los Angeles Times building, the American Apparel factory and, when I was there, the residual forest-fire smoke still lingering over Pasadena.

But what makes National Biscuit Company No. 703 especially desirable are the furniture and personal effects — although they belong to no person — that Meridith Baer & Associates put inside. Hand-selected from the firm’s inventory, which takes up 135,000 square feet of warehouse space, they are exactly the objets that I would own in the urban-bohemian-plutocrat-Angeleno version of my life. There in the dining room are the Louis XV chairs and settee, the Aubusson carpet and the slightly kitschy hand-carved wooden candelabras, all set off by the stone urn covered in moss — which I surely picked up somewhere in my travels — and the ersatz Giacometti sculpture. There is the 30-foot port-colored velvet curtain that falls the height of the entire loft. But to show that I am not mired in the distant European past, there are the off-white Philippe Starck chairs and, in the bathroom, his Louis Ghost chairs. To show I am not a culture snob, there are the Stephen Verona black-and-white prints of populist heroes like Leonard Bernstein and Henry Winkler. And to show that I am not some prissy collector, there is the mountain bike, hanging by hooks from the ceiling.

Someday soon, at its current $2.9 million asking price or something lower, somebody, my West Coast fantasy version of me, will buy Biscuit 703, and when that happens Meridith Baer’s trucks will back up to the freight elevator and cart all her furniture and effects — the curtain and the settee, the Aubusson and the Starcks, the piano and even the copy of Thomas Keller’s “French Laundry Cookbook,” which now sits on the kitchen countertop, helpfully opened to Page 27 — back to the warehouse, which is in an industrial area southeast of Los Angeles. Each item will be reshelved, awaiting the moment Baer or one of her 12 designers takes it down for use in another house. This is the fate of Baer’s art. It not only lacks the obvious permanence of a movie or book; it lacks even the place in our memory accorded a great concert or play. For once the house sells, her pieces leave, to be replaced by whatever the owner or his decorator fancies.

Barb Schwarz, a real estate broker from Seattle, claims she was the first home stager, in the 1970s. (She founded the International Association of Home Staging Professionals and the online Staging University.) Since then, thousands of stagers have offered their services to sellers and their brokers, promising that their touches will help a house move, even in the worst markets. Some stagers charge mere hundreds of dollars and offer helpful hints, like “take down that picture” or “reposition that sofa.” Others will, for thousands of dollars, prescribe a full makeover with advice on what color to repaint your walls, what shrubs to uproot and what to plant and what new bathroom fixtures will appeal to today’s discerning buyer; they will even subcontract the work for you, hiring painters and gardeners, renting tables and beds.

Then there are the grandes dames, of whom Meridith Baer is perhaps the grandest. She began just before the late, great real estate bubble, in a region where developers, building fast and big, often needed enough furniture to make 9,000 empty square feet seem cozy and lived in. She will provide that furniture as well as art, books, silverware and touches of ready-made character. What she doesn’t have, her staff of 70, including decorators, movers, carpenters and upholsterers, will make or find. She will then bill you $20,000, $30,000, even $50,000, plus a monthly rental fee if the house sits on the market. And you — if you have developed a house on spec, and it’s sitting there calmly ignorant of the real estate crash while you panic about your mounting bills — will pay that fee. You’ll pay it because you believe that a good home stager moves houses, and because, as much as you needed her when times were good, you fear that you need her now more than ever.

Meridith Baer has no training in real estate, interior design, construction, art, architecture, fabrics, carpentry or urban planning. She often doesn’t know what designer is responsible for a chair she owns or what period an antique comes from. But she has brains, energy and a rather startling degree of luck.

Baer was born in 1947 and spent her early years living in a house on the grounds of San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco, where her father was a warden. When she was 13, her father moved the family to Des Moines, where he had been hired to oversee Iowa’s prisons. Baer’s mother was “a wild collector of everything beautiful,” who dragged Baer and her two brothers to every roadside flea market or tag sale they passed. In Des Moines, she also began buying and selling houses. “I was thinking one of the reasons I’m compelled to do what I do is because I moved 15 times before I was 15 years old,” Baer says, with perhaps a little bit of exaggeration. “We kept moving from house to house in Des Moines, because she was flipping.”

Baer’s first bit of luck came when she was attending the University of Colorado. She was approached by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, still years away from “American Gigolo” or “Top Gun,” who asked if she would like to be in a Pepsi commercial that he was producing nearby. She was flattered and figured, Why not? “I started getting these checks in the mail,” she says. “I thought that was kind of cool.” Baer moved to New York and kept modeling. She helped sell a lot of cigarettes: she was a Winston girl, a Kent girl and a Benson & Hedges girl.

Her every-girl quality — “I’m little, I’m not glamorous,” she says — worked for television too. When she moved to Los Angeles, she found small acting parts. She was in one episode of “CHiPs” and the last episode of “Happy Days.” She began writing and selling screenplays. A script based on her childhood at San Quentin was made into a forgettable 1981 movie with Tatum O’Neal. Meanwhile, Baer dated the author Michael Crichton, married and divorced a photographer and found herself, in 1991, on a blind date with the English actor Patrick Stewart. “I fell in love with his voice,” Baer says. “He showed up at my door and here was this bald guy. I had no idea who he was. But he had this beautiful voice.”

Photo

Meridith Baer at a home in Brentwood that her company furnished so it could be sold.Credit
Catherine Ledner for The New York Times

Baer stopped acting and writing; her new full-time job was being with Stewart. After they broke up two years later, she moved into “a little house in Brentwood, 1,100 square feet.” Having “lived in a very cool house with Patrick,” she was depressed by her new digs. “But I woke up the next morning bound to make it beautiful. I bought a fountain to keep the noise out. I planted roses.” For four years, she poured her own money into the house. “Next thing you knew it was the most beautiful place you’d ever seen,” she said. “Then the owner came to town and said, ‘Oh, my God, I could make a lot of money on this.’ And he kicked me out.” The owner put the house on the market, and it sold right away.

This experience did not make Baer think she wanted to be a stager. For one thing, there were no stagers, at least as far as Baer knew. For another, there seemed to be renewed life in her writing career: Barbra Streisand’s production company asked Baer to write an adaptation of a novel that Baer had optioned. But the Streisand people weren’t offering much money, and meanwhile the broker who sold the house she redecorated came to Baer with a proposal for other houses he was listing: “The broker was saying, ‘Can you do this for me?’ ” And Baer decided that she could.

THAT WAS IN 1998, and since then her business has, she says, doubled every year except for the current one. Baer estimates that about 90 percent of her staging is in new houses, either built on spec or extensively rehabilitated by an investor. Her furniture currently sits in about 130 houses, and her dozen designers will stage more than 300 houses in 2009. Baer rarely stages the houses herself anymore, but she keeps buying — hitting flea markets and estate sales and antique stores; she is responsible for the warehouse’s 2,000 antique French lemonade bottles, its five-foot-tall pepper-mill lamp, its sculptured metal monkey holding a broom (“I don’t know why I bought that, but it will sell a house someday”) and its antique proctological probes. She says she has staged houses being sold by Halle Berry, Bob Dylan and Harrison Ford, and houses she staged were purchased by Brad Pitt, Reese Witherspoon and Sean Combs. She recently staged 40 Beverly Park, a mansion in Beverly Hills that she says was the most expensive house purchased in America this year (the original asking price was $45 million, although it was reportedly reduced to $31.5 million before it sold).

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She hired her nephew, Brett Baer, in 2004, a few years after he got his M.B.A.; he grew up in Michigan, where his father teaches at a Christian college, and had never lived in California before. He seems well acclimated, very comfortable in his Venice Beach loft and on his cellphone, which he freely put to use even in a restaurant whose menu was printed with the command “No cellphones in the dining room.” He declined to give an official title, saying only, “I do the business development; I do sales; I sign-up work.” Baer’s other aide-de-camp is Heide Ziecker, who has answered phones, kept the books and, Baer says, “been one of our top designers.” Like Brett, Heide has a very un-Hollywood background: her father is Hal Lindsey, the apocalyptic Christian Zionist who co-wrote “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s.

Los Angeles is the land of reinvention, where names change, noses change, lives change. And Baer’s business is making people comfortable with that reinvention. Many of the people buying staged houses in the pricey neighborhoods where Baer does most of her work are from other countries; still more are new to the West Coast. “They have always heard ‘Beverly Hills,’ and they want ‘Beverly Hills,’ ” she says. But they don’t know what that’s supposed to look like. Baer gives them the luxury they expect, with just enough eccentric accouterments that they don’t expect. The Baer effect, according to the Los Angeles power real estate agent Mary Lu Tuthill, who has worked with her, is that the buyers “feel comfortable thinking, I’d love to live in this house — look how these people live in this house!”

As Brett nails down another deal on his forbidden phone during lunch, Ziecker tells me: “There’s a signature look that runs through our houses. And that’s . . . a look that someone lives in it, and they’re well traveled and sophisticated. But they live there.” Baer says that for living rooms she likes her designers to begin with a white sofa, then go from there. “You can change the pillows, you can change the throws, you can make it Chinese,” she says. The designers can accessorize however they like, “but they are stuck with the stuff I buy.” And they are stuck with her sense of the theatrical. She likes to imagine one bedroom as the married couple’s, another as the little boy’s or girl’s, still another as the mother-in-law’s, where the décor is more formal and “the mattress isn’t too comfortable.”

“I always have a character in my head,” Baer says. “After 20 years of screenwriting, I got to see only two movies made, and neither of those movies represented what I had in mind. I get to make up for that missing thing when I go around to the houses.” She tries to avoid stuff that’s “matchy-matchy,” to use her term of derision, like furniture ensembles that look as if they were moved en masse from a showroom floor.

But Paul Morrow, a developer and general contractor who has twice hired Baer, says that she’s willing to bend according to the character of the house. “In an Italian-villa-style house, she can’t use her white linen with dark-wood furniture,” he says, and one of her strengths is that “she’ll redo it until it’s right.”

A stager’s vision is always subordinate to the owner’s need to sell, hence the extreme tactics that Baer is willing to use. She sprinkled 1083 Hillcrest Road, the Beverly Hills house where Groucho Marx lived until his death, with Groucho-themed art, including a replica of an Andy Warhol portrait of Groucho himself, then had her workers fabricate a weathered, autographed script for “Monkey Business,” which she mounted on the wall under plexiglass. Prospective buyers can thus partake of the house’s history while imagining that they’ve added to it. The buyer can imagine herself part of old Hollywood; and rich enough to own a Warhol; and quirky enough to have found the script at an auction.

The girl from the Benson & Hedges billboard, her nephew from the Midwest, her assistant born of evangelical royalty — they seem to have clear heads and share a sense of humor about what they do. They help new money fall in love with new houses. Even the unfurnished houses themselves are acts of aspiration: built on a leveraged prayer, often on the remains of an old tear-down that some investor thought could be improved upon. There may be no history to the land, but Meridith Baer can fix that.

“We’re not finding the cure to cancer,” Baer says. “But we are helping people see how they’ll live in the house — where they’ll hang art, where they’ll eat. The kind of thing they’re not good at because they are finding the cure to cancer.”